On October 21, 2015, Scott Aaronson will give an IST Lecture titled “Computational Complexity and Fundamental Physics”. He is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has received various awards including the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation. His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory.
In his lecture, Scott Aaronson will discuss how computational complexity theory - the study of what is and isn’t feasibly computable - has been giving us new insight into the nature of physical law. He will give his personal view of quantum computing's key ideas, status, and prospects, placing the attempt to build practical quantum computers in the broader context of the quest to understand the ultimate physical limits of computation.

Promising approaches to large-field inflation from string theory are difficult to construct, even at a superficial level. The simplest constructions fail and one requires technically involved models which face many challenges from data as well as from the model building side. Are these difficulties a hint that string theory does not admit large-field inflation? Indeed, recently it was argued that the Weak Gravity Conjecture — a folk theorem about consistent theories of Quantum Gravity — is in conflict with a large class of inflation models from string theory. In this talk I want to review this conjecture and explain its significance for large-field inflation from string theory. Interestingly, the conjecture leaves a loophole for large-field inflation and I will explore to what extent string theory can exploit this loophole.